


just give it time

by andawaywego



Series: it for me [2]
Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/F, Happy Ending, Minor Violence, Sexual Content, Smut, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, True freakin' Love man, a bit angsty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-17 11:20:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29099448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andawaywego/pseuds/andawaywego
Summary: "So: this is what it’s like to be marked, this is how it feels to belong to someone.Jamie thought it would hurt more. It doesn’t hurt at all. It doesn’t burn or ache or jab."[Jamie doesn't believe in love. Right up until she does.]also: a sequel to "cherry-colored love (on and on and on)"
Relationships: Dani Clayton/Jamie
Series: it for me [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2135049
Comments: 41
Kudos: 208





	just give it time

**Author's Note:**

> this thing fought me tooth and nail. i really hope you like it and that it was worth the wait!
> 
> basically, this is Jamie's side of the events of Dani's story, with some bonus stuff that follows their sappy little love confession at the end of the first one. with bonus, possibly obnoxious parallels to its source material. woo.
> 
> as a warning, there are some mentions of things like physical abuse (between siblings) and some tough family situations.
> 
> please read on and enjoy, loves.

“Dani,” says Jamie, trying to keep her voice steady, “it’s _you_.”

And Dani’s breath flutters against her chin, her lips twisting into a beautiful frown. “What do you—?” she begins, but:

This is her _soulmate._ This is who was waiting for her all this time. 

“This.” Jamie lifts her marked fingers to grip Dani’s wrist, pressing closer like she thinks she might be able to pull Dani into herself if she just tries hard enough. “It’s you.”

This is _it_ . This is everything Jamie did not think she’d ever choose _choosing her_ in return, and all she can do is hold tight and never, ever let her go. 

And Dani doesn’t understand, doesn’t dare to dream that it could _possibly_ —

So Jamie steels herself, lines her heart in stones to keep it from getting away from her, and says something she never thought she’d say to anyone:

“You’re _it_ for me, too.”

______________

“You’re stupid if you miss her,” says Denny, gap-toothed and brick-fisted as he stands above his sister, who is trying to comfort their crying, toddler little brother. He is ten-years-old with the same blazing eyes their mother has and a knife-sharp smirk that he wears each time he thinks he’s already won.

“S’okay,” says Jamie to baby Mikey. She is seven-years-old and so small that Mikey looks huge in her arms. “S’not for always. Mommy’s coming back. Soon. Okay?”

Denny cracks his knuckles against his leg. “No, she’s not,” he says. “She’s never coming back.”

Mikey cries harder and Jamie glares at her older brother. “Quit it,” she says. 

“She’s a stupid whore. Everybody knows it. Even Dad knows it. That’s why he hasn’t gone after her.”

It’s been three days since their mother left Jamie and Mikey at the grocery store in town. One moment she was there and the next she was gone. The cashier was nice and had pretty blonde hair. She squeezed Jamie’s shoulder and gave Mikey a toy fire engine to play with so he’d stop crying while the manager called the police to come get them. But she isn’t here now and Denny stomped on the fire engine the day before and Mikey won’t stop crying.

“Shut up, Denny.”

“Carl’s dad says only a _whore_ would sleep around on her soulmate and skip town with a traveling salesman.”

Jamie doesn’t know what some of those words mean, but she hates Denny’s sharp grin and the way his lips curl around it. Mikey, snot-nosed, presses his face against her sweater, bawling his eyes out, oblivious to anything his older brother is saying. For three days, his entire world has been narrowed down to the singular ripping of a moment in time: the jingling- _slam_ of the grocery store doors and the chug-chug- _rev_ of an unfamiliar car driven by a slick-haired man with a handsome smile as he drove their mother away from them. 

“Stop calling her that,” Jamie says, remembering the silver brush of color across her mother’s palm. How it shimmered in the sunlight as she gripped the steering wheel on the way to the store. Smiling like always, lipstick and curled-hair wonderful that Jamie misses every moment with a humming throb. Like a wound. Like a stab. Like something has been torn out that will never grow back.

Mikey wails louder, red-eyed and purpling from how much oxygen he’s using to make those terrible sounds. It’s too much—all of it—and Jamie can feel the world tilting on its axis as Denny gives her that wolf-hungry smile. 

“She’s a stupid _whore_ and she’s never coming back. She’s—”

And Jamie, like her mother, isn’t given to restraint or careful calculation, isn’t given to _anything_ really save for the raw peel of pure emotion that bursts like blood vessels beneath her skin; she launches herself at her brother, a flurry of hits on his shoulders and head, curling her hand into a fist so she can punch it into his ribcage and tackle him to the ground, keep hitting him, hitting him, _hitting him_.

Because she is seven-years-old and her mother is gone, her brother won’t stop crying, and her father hadn’t even been _surprised_ when the police got a hold of him all the way underground afterwards. She is seven-years-old and, like many seven-year-olds, she has grown up believing in fairytales and love stories; she has eyed her mother’s palm with envy and imagined her own soulmate, somewhere out in the world, and now everything— _all of it_ —has shattered like glass, slicing into her skin and muscles and heart. 

Leaving her alone. Alone, alone, alone.

Because she is seven-years-old and she doesn’t believe in love anymore. This is the most grievous wound a child can bear.

(“ _Jamie!_ Jamie, stop! Stop, come on, Jamie—” her father says as he rushes into the room, jagged exhaustion evident on his dust-lined face. He is also tired. He is also alone. Dimmed and angry, a dark silver handprint can be seen on the cup of his left cheek from where their mother slapped him at that first meeting. Called him a _drunk full-of-himself asshole_ and then fell madly in love with him. Jamie has heard the story a hundred times—will hear it a handful more when her father speaks wistfully of a wife that never returned. He pulls his red-faced, tear-stricken daughter off his bruised son and holds her to his chest firmly, pressing his marked cheek into her brown curls, shushing her, letting her cry. My darling girl, he thinks; so like her mother.)

______________

Some lessons Jamie’s mother taught her: 

  1. Scrub behind your ears
  2. Shoes off in the house
  3. Always let the police do the talking
  4. Don’t spend money you don’t have
  5. Trust your gut



Some things Jamie’s mother never intended to teach her:

  1. You are the only person who can make you happy
  2. Everyone’s got an angle
  3. Soul bonds are prisons 
  4. Love is a mirage
  5. Why ( _why why why even_ ) bother



______________

Words can mean all sorts of things. Their mother called them her _babies_ or _sweets_ or _loves_ when she really meant _baggage to be tossed from the train._ Their father says _listen_ when he means _I don’t know_ and Mikey says _Jame-bee_ when he means _where are they taking me_ . Denny says _whore_ and _bitch_ when he means _Jamie_ and Jamie says nothing. Keeps her mouth shut and her head down.

She learns that words can turn to venom with a simple slip of tone. Stress the wrong part and they become _fire_ or _disobedience._ Their case worker says _difficult home-life_ when she means _damaged_ and one of Jamie’s foster mothers calls her husband _friendly_ when she means _large, hulking, mouth-breathing, perverted son-of-a-bitch_. 

In the second foster home after Mikey’s adoption, a girl named Susan leaves a yellow mark on Denny when their arms brush at dinner and says, “We’re going to be together forever,” in the cool dark of their shared bedroom. 

Jamie is sleeping on the creaky cot by the window, shivering as the damp winter chill breaks through the window panes. Each time she blinks, her eyelids are painted silver, and her lungs squeeze and ache whenever she remembers Mikey’s curly, dark hair on the top of his head. How he giggled when Jamie puffed up her cheeks and let out a huff of air as she flattened them back down with her palms. How he grinned like mad whenever she hid her face behind her hands only to reappear when she dropped them, laughing and reaching for her hands with his clumsy hands.

“That means we’ll be sisters!” Susan says. She is turned to face Jamie in the dark, the moonlight glinting off her eyes like the sun in the rearview mirror. 

Jamie doesn’t need a sister. She has two brothers. She doesn’t need them either. She says, “Guess so,” in a voice that is not her own because she wants Susan to drop it. To stop thinking of Denny—with his cruel fists and fight-happy teeth—like a prince or a frog or dream-come-true. 

_Soulmates,_ she thinks, and she really means: _how sharp the cage’s bars must cut once caught_.

______________

Another thing soulmate comes to mean: _poisonous hope for the cureless_.

______________

Sarah is not her soulmate—she is walking _free_ —and Jamie is nineteen.

Her heart feels like torn flesh. Her wrists are mottled purple and handcuff-sliced. Her back hurts from the thin and stiff prison mattress she’s spent two nights sleeping on. 

_How stupid_ , she thinks, _what love makes you do._

She is rapidly remembering why she’d tried to swear off the practice. But then Sarah waltzed into her life, all beat-up high-tops and hair like the sun. She kissed with the ease of someone used to leaving heartbroken lovers in her wake, but her touch—her hands and tongue and _oh_ the way her voice sounded in the dark—made Jamie forget why she should steer clear.

And now, here she is.

“Chin up, darling,” says her bunkmate, Laurie. “You can get used to anything.”

She is silver-haired and kind-eyed, faded tattoos running wrapped around her arms like willowy branches. Her accent is thick and unrecognizable but she lets Jamie sit with her crew at meals and guides her out to the greenhouse in the yard during rec time. 

As she says it, she hands over a watering can—this rusted, metal thing the same color silver as her mother’s palms—and points Jamie’s feet in the direction of the ferns in the corner. 

“I don’t know shit about growing things,” Jamie argues and Laurie just grins and bumps her shoulder into Jamie’s. 

“Here’s your first lesson then,” she says, “always start with what you _do_ know.”

Jamie tightens her grip on the watering can, feels the harsh snap-cold of the metal burning ice into her palm. Her arm feels exhausted from the weight already. “And what do I know?”

Laurie smiles, tender-toothed brilliance and a wet-soil smudge on her cheek. “I reckon you’ve loved things before, yeah?” She nods to the watering can in Jamie’s hand. “Well, water equals love and nothing lives without love.”

Belatedly, Jamie notices a gold path of color the size of a thumb slipping down Laurie’s left upper arm, interrupting the blossoming roses threaded across the skin there.

And, true or not, Jamie understands. She waters each plant carefully. Delicately. Takes her time. 

She doesn’t know love very well. Not really. But she knows enough to start learning.

______________

Once she’s out, Denny finds her in London and asks her to dinner. He’s married to Susan now. A kid on the way. Wants to make amends before becoming a father.

“I was a stupid kid,” he says from across the table. “We were all hurt and I took it out on anyone I could. Especially you. I’m sorry for that. You didn’t deserve it.”

“No,” says Jamie, twenty-years-old and remembering the water-happy spread of leaves in the sun of the prison greenhouse; thinking of Sarah’s letter filled with apologies without any admission of guilt. “No, I didn’t.”

______________

“There’s something I promised I’d ask you,” says Jamie’s boss, the owner of a flower shop on Long Lane in the city. He wears his mint green mark on his chin quite proudly—the place where his wife, Jamie’s _other_ boss, kissed him at the end of their first date. He’s a tall man, long and lanky, young enough to be some long-lost brother of hers and it’s been obvious in the way he’s treated her for the last three years that he feels the same way about her. 

Bathed in the watery afternoon light, surrounded by plants that hang from every corner of the space, rest on every white shelf and bench, he is a combination of giddy and apprehensive. Jamie looks up from the bouquet she’s hand-tying and eyes him warily, waiting for the other boot to drop.

“Promised who?” she asks and he huffs out a laugh, leaning back against the counter with his arms crossed.

“Funny enough, the man who ordered the bouquet you’re working on.”

Jamie tries to recall what he’d looked like, this man. She remembers tired eyes and a pinched smile. _For my niece_ , he’d said, _for her birthday._ “Yeah?”

A nod. “His brother, I guess, is looking for a groundskeeper for their place in the country. He asked if I might know anyone who’d be interested.”

There’s a long pause here while Jamie struggles to keep up with what he’s saying.

“You mean me,” she decided finally, and he nods. “Am I—?”

She doesn’t have to finish the question—doesn’t have to ask what it is she’s done that’s made him want to get rid of her. He rushes in to explain before she can.

“Of course I don’t want to lose you. Jess and I would be _lost_ without you,” he explains. “You’ve just mentioned wanting to get out of the city for a while. And, honestly, the salary this bloke was boasting, I mean...I almost took him up on it myself.”

Okay, so: an opportunity then. A chance to regroup. Jamie makes decent money at the shop, but she’s sharing a flat with three other people and the idea of going _elsewhere_ tastes like magic in the back of her throat. 

“He said, if you’re interested, to give him a call,” comes the next bit, and then a business card is handed over to it. 

Jamie holds it with damp fingers and stares down at it. It doesn’t look life-changing or important at all, but, then, fate has a knack for unfolding in the dusty corners of the ordinary, doesn’t it?

______________

What happens: Dominic Wingrave offers her a job and Jamie takes it.

So watch: the way she takes to the rose bushes around the statue garden. See how they bloom in the luminous sunlight of the country spring. The flush of color after a sapphire rainfall, the swirling blue-gold-reds of the scattered tree blossoms, the lush green scuffs of grass across the grounds. Jamie in her element, making things _grow_ and the real phenomenon is this:

When the children, Miles and Flora, chase after her begging to help, she lets them.

She lets them smile and laugh and pick up fallen branches. Shows them the proper way to prune the roses. Takes special care to teach them how to water the plants that need it because water is love and everyone must love something.

Jamie loves the plants, loves the kids, and they love her back.

The same can be said for Hannah and for Owen.

Hannah and her easy lean into Owen’s arms; that charming grin he gives everyone who passes him by. Jamie has always preferred the lonesome and, when she could not get that, she learned to prefer plants.

This is difficult when there are people who are learning to prefer _her_.

She’s figuring it out.

The Wingraves are an anomaly. Love each other without a shared soulmark. Flora seems to find this romantic. Miles couldn’t care any less about it or soulmates or anything mushy. He likes stories from outer space—aliens and space pirates and planets in crisis. He and Flora put on two-man plays based on some of the books he reads, some of the movies he watches. Their parents and Hannah and Owen are charmed beyond belief, but there is no one Flora charms quite like their uncle.

Henry who drops by so often that he practically _lives_ in the house. Who calls at odd hours and asks to speak to Charlotte. He has a brush of bright red on the fingertips of his left hand. Given that he’s given to tucking this hand into the pockets of his trousers or waistcoats, it’s some time before Jamie notices this.

Even more time passes before she happens to see the small of Charlotte’s back, revealed in a bracing evening gown that she only wears when Dominic is away on business. Red fingerprints against her spine. A spot so often hidden by her clothing. A spot revealed bare and unmarked in some of the wedding photographs of her and Dominic that litter the walls of the house.

 _Soul-bond_ , Jamie thinks; another word for _doomed_.

______________

And then the accident happens. Dominic and Charlotte don’t come home. Flora sobbing into Hannah’s arms. Miles crying into Jamie’s. She thinks of baby Mikey; that red fire engine splintered beneath Denny’s boot heel.

 _She’s never coming back no she’s not not ever_ —

______________

Things are very, very complicated for a while. Hope comes in the happy, star-bright face of the children’s new nanny, Rebecca.

Flora has someone else to fawn over. Miles has someone else to impress.

Jamie wants to wrap them in her arms to protect them— _just in case_ —but Rebecca laughs easy and smiles like _thank you_ and Jamie can’t help but learn to trust her. This is something she is not quite used to doing.

Things get better for a long time and then Peter—Peter _fucking_ Quint—tips the whole thing off the cliffside. All of the changes have been difficult for everyone, but Peter is the worst of it. He hovers at the edges of everything until Rebecca arrives and then she becomes his plan for getting through. Snarky comments. Annoyed looks. Suffocating ownership.

“Tell me he didn’t leave a mark,” Jamie asks Rebecca with a grimace after a particularly loud row between her and Peter.

Rebecca plucks Jamie’s cigarette from between her fingers and leans against the wooden post of the gazebo. She frowns. “No,” she answers. “It’s not like that.”

There’s a note of desperation tossed in there with relief, like some part of her wishes it _was_ like that and being tangled inside Peter is how Jamie imagines that mark could make things: caught inside a wooden box, hands pinned behind your back, running, running, running out of air and no way out. Never a way out.

“Thank fuck for that,” says Jamie, says the daughter of a mother who _left_ , says the unmarked vagabond, the taker-of-blame; a woman free from the burden of a soulmark but not from the weight.

______________

Three months later, Peter disappears with Henry’s money and doesn’t come back. 

Rebecca replaces him. Leaves for London. Everyone shifts under this new change.

Things move on. Of course they do, because that’s the way of the world, and all things must move ever forward.

______________

Jamie turns twenty-five; she is used to celebrating privately, but Owen finds out somehow and makes her a cake, lights the candles and the children sing and laugh and clap when she blows the flames out, looking lighter and softer than they have in the year since they lost their parents. They have each other. They have their uncle in whatever way he gives himself to them. And they have them: three adults charged with their care who have shouldered the equal burden of carrying them out of the fire.

Owen and Hannah have each other. They make things look simple and easy; love can be, Jamie thinks, but it usually isn’t.

What she’s been forgetting: she is still that girl that believed in love even as she pretends she is _not_ and that girl _burns_ in the bitter prison of unmarked skin. 

She has loved without that bond, but at what cost, those eleven months behind bars. Truly, she does not _need_ anyone. She tells herself this over and over and sometimes she thinks it’s true. If she left a splatter of color on some stranger’s skin, she would leave. Walk away. Not even bother.

That’s the plan anyway.

And there are some things that you start to believe if you really want to. 

Jamie hasn’t decided if she wants to yet.

( _you deserve love you were made to love,_ said Laurie, and this is the truest thing anyone has ever said to her, but she cannot quite bring herself to believe it, even now)

______________

And then Dani Clayton shows up.

______________

Jamie isn’t sure what to make of her, this new governess that the children fall in love with so easily. She is cautious. Hesitant. Gentle. And not in any way that Jamie has seen before. She seems haunted, pale skin and dark shadows hung beneath her striking eyes; there is something about her that sparks hot and red. That burns. A strange fire, not like that which cuts down all within its path, nor as the orange-red warmth from the hearth on a cold night.

If it is fire, it is quiet. Inching. The intermittent spark of flame at the end of a cigarette upon inhaling. Puffs of air on a birthday candle, wavering the light just before it extinguishes. There is something in Jamie’s chest that feels like thick globs of mindless hail hammering into raw bone. She is certain she could spend her entire life trying to understand it and never succeed.

A new tactic by old means: she hangs around the edges at first, seeing how it goes, figuring out her footing before stepping inside.

She’s never been one for introductions, so she just steers clear of them. 

Dani wears gloves. Dani is running from something. Dani is just sharp enough to slice words into the thin muscles beneath Jamie’s rib cage and if Jamie were to cut herself wide open, this is what they would say:

_Stay stay stay please don’t try to run just—_

______________

What Jamie notices: the way Dani’s eyes track her every move whenever they are near one another.

What Jamie knows: Dani is scared of something, perhaps the same thing Jamie is scared of—finding something she has not asked for in someone else’s touch.

What Jamie is trying to forget: she has known the fallout of the bond going sour and she has known it _well_.

______________

The children love her. Dani, that is. It’s obvious in the way Flora is always reaching for her, in the way that Miles puffs his chest out proudly whenever he falls in her favor. The recent loss of Rebecca—so soon after their parents—has cost them something that only Dani seems capable of fully putting back together again. 

It is clear in everything she does—how she makes pinched, amused faces whenever Owen tells a bad joke; how she loops her arm through Hannah’s when they’re walking the grounds; the way she carries Flora on her back sometimes, laughing the whole way; the gentle hand she places on Miles’s shoulder whenever he is trying to keep a stiff upper-lip about something—that she loves very easily, very readily.

It’s a stunning experience, but Jamie is caught beneath a question that Dany’s unequivocal affection towards anything with a pulse has posed: _what_ , then, are the gloves for?

______________

She thinks the answer lies somewhere in her own simple truth: the moment Dani arrives and flashes a smile like flickering starlight, Jamie makes sure to keep her hands to herself.

Dani is a pull on Jamie’s self-control. She is the very first thing that has been and Jamie thinks that must mean something. It must, it _must_ , or else it will mean nothing at all.

______________

“You’re good with ‘em,” says Jamie in the garden beneath the cursive sunlight.

“They’re good with _me_ ,” says Dani. “That’s not true for a lot of people.”

______________

Here is what Jamie knows about her mother: she did not open the door of her cage gently, she _melted_ the cage while she was still in it and flew away burned and scorched and scarred.

(she has known this for as long as she can remember and it cuts her off at the waist, leaving nothing for Jamie to stand on, because her mother is not the only one whose flesh was torn off by the heat)

Charred. Bloodied. Jamie suffered those wounds too and flinches at the slightest flicker of Dani’s fire, but she _wants_ her, too. More than she has ever wanted anything before, she wants her.

All this in mind, Jamie slips open the door the slightest bit and allows Dani to stand in the gap, not all the way in, no, but closer than Jamie has ever let another. She does not push her away, does not let herself consider that Dani is perhaps hiding a soulmark beneath the gloves, that they serve as some kind of funeral shroud. She says things like _we’re damned lucky to have you_ and _I hope you know that_ even though she was once a girl who did not believe in love, who knew the biting puncture of desertion and has never labelled her mother _villain_ despite the clenching maw of time.

Owen’s mother dies. Jamie thinks of Denny’s nose and lips, bloodied beneath the crush of her fists all those years ago. She can feel the past as it comes to life around her, clutching Owen tight in her arms as he cries. All those memories. Around and inside of her, and she feels the tentative hope of a reunion and the _pain_ of being given up for something greater.

What it is to have that choice.

Dani walks her out to her truck and they speak in gentle tones about loneliness. Jamie moves slower than she ever has before, her fists clenched at her side because she doesn’t want to leave just yet and then she is standing before Dani and Dani is reaching out, is touching her for the very first time. Her hand closes around Jamie’s, the sliding fabric of her glove pressed cold to Jamie’s skin. She squeezes.

And Jamie is so full of love in that moment, so enamored by this yawning ache of a woman.

Dani’s eyes are wide with emotion. Jamie feels it too. Feels the buzzing of her skin where it’s being warmed by Dani’s hand because it’s not skin-to-skin, but _oh,_ if it were she knows this would be it. It would be _finally_ it. 

Jamie squeezes back and there’s a pulsing echo in her chest of something far-long-gone. She imagines wrapping Dani in her arms, kissing her very softly on the crown of her head, on the peak of her nose, below her left eye. Imagines kissing down her neck and chest, tugging that sweater up, dropping to her knees in the digging gravel and Dani giving in to her, softening, forgetting whatever it is she’s left behind.

The touch fades. It has to. Jamie pulls away and opens the door of her truck and Dani watches her go. Does not try to stop her.

“Who the hell knew?” she asks no one in particular and that’s as much as she can take.

______________

The next question asked: “Are you okay?”

Dani’s voice wavers around the question. Outside, the sky is alabaster-blue, the sun hidden behind the pale clouds drifting across the sky like they want to fall to the earth. It drifts in through the windows, hitting the side of Jamie’s face, bathing her in baptismal light. Of all days, Jamie thinks, of all _times_. 

Her breath is shredded in her lungs. Something in the back of her mind is breaking, is screaming, is crying out for her to pull away, to forget, to _reject_ , but she can’t. Not right away. Not with Dani so close before her, fearful eyes pressing Jamie into the floorboards beneath her feet. Not with Dani splatter-spined in the same light blue that’s bled across Jamie’s fingers. 

So: this is what it’s like to be marked, this is how it feels to _belong_ to someone.

Jamie thought it would hurt more. It doesn’t hurt at all. It doesn’t burn or ache or jab. 

What it does do: sing soothing siren songs into Jamie’s ear, magnetic melodies lined with images of what Dani would do if Jamie were to just kiss her right there; lean into it; kiss her and kiss her and then say, _there you are i didn’t expect you but I—_

She is so caught beneath Dani’s gaze that she doesn’t hear the question right away. 

“Yeah,” she decides finally. “Yeah, ’course I am.”

Dani is her _soulmate_. 

_Dani_ is her soulmate.

There it is. Plain and simple, except—

Not simple, no. Never simple. Because Jamie’s life so far has been an endless cage and the last thing she wants to do is lock herself in even further. More importantly: Dani makes her want to lose herself to this thrumming buzz between them. Dani is a snare hidden beneath the leaves and the dirt.

Owen’s mother is dead. Jamie’s mother is gone. 

Jamie says, “I should get going,” because she cannot let herself stay.

Dani seems...disappointed. Confused. Flushed red with distress. 

And Jamie understands. She feels the same way, even as she’s slipping out of Dani’s room and moving further and further away.

______________

That night. The bonfire out in the yard. Jamie gets a little carried away in her toast and lets too much slip. She thinks Dani must pick up on it, except Dani is cold and distant, drifting into the fog in a boat that’s taking on water. There is something that is off and Jamie can’t decide what it is, what she’s done. 

She worries: did Dani see her own mark on her back and figure it out?

And: it’s because it’s me, it’s because it’s me and why would anyone like her ever want—

A chorus of voices ring in Jamie’s head, begging her to ask, to figure it out, but she just bites her tongue until her teeth are copper-slick with blood. Dani’s eyes meet hers for only the briefest of moments, some vision of the future passing over her face and Jamie wonders if all the things she has been terrified of all her life have been flickering through Dani’s mind, too.

______________

In the greenhouse, Dani asks about Jamie’s blue fingers and Jamie thinks she knows why it is that she’s been withdrawing all night. She doesn’t let herself hope or dream or anything similar, but she wants to, oh she wants to because Dani is so gentle and careful-palmed, blue eyes and corn-silk hair and her _soulmate_.

Dani’s lost someone. Pieces of the puzzle snap soundly into place and then Dani is touching her reverently, skin-to-skin for the first time, looking at how their hands fit together. Frowning because she thought—

Jamie leans in, can’t hold herself back any longer, and kisses Dani—soft at first, but once Dani kisses her back, harder and harder because this moment, like the others, will end and she does not want to meet what is waiting for her after. Not yet. She puts every single ounce of herself into the kiss, feels electricity crackle over her lips, down her chest, into her stomach and it’s really something because it’s _never_ been like that before and Jamie is both very surprised by this and not surprised at all.

She pulls away eventually, but stays close, breathes her relief at being wanted in return against Dani’s parted lips. They’re too far apart, somehow, and Jamie slides her hand around to cup the back of Dani’s neck, to keep her steady. She, too, is worried about floating off and she’d always planned on running from this, but there is lead in her legs and she cannot imagine letting Dani go again.

Jamie whispers apologies into Dani’s mouth, tries to form a sentence that sounds like, _I know you’ve been running from this but I’m so glad I found you, I’m so glad you’re_ **_here_ ** _._

Before she can, Dani is crying and Jamie doesn’t understand. Hears, “I’m the one who should be sorry,” and can’t actually fathom _why_ Dani thinks this. Kisses the curve of her frown and then: “You have a soulmate and I should just—”

It’s like she can’t breathe, lips still parted, blue-tipped fingers trembling as she pulls away and looks into Dani’s wounded eyes. All these years, all those times Jamie has been alone, Dani has been alive on this earth just _waiting_ for her.

The irony: Dani has no idea that Jamie has been waiting for her, too.

And she asks because she has to, because she needs to know. “Dani, do you want this?”

But: “I just want things to be simple.”

The tension that snaps is bright-hot, lava flowing in her veins as she stumbles her way to her feet and then just _away_ , mumbling things she doesn’t mean to Dani, who she leaves in the swallow of the dark.

Something new that she learns: regret offers little dignity, even in surrender.

______________

Jamie sweeps into her flat with the weight of a hailstorm and has barely collapsed on her bed before she tastes the salt-bitter of tears on her lips. She thinks about silver palms and silver cheeks and the brown-blue of bruises from the fists of her brother and his friends; the crimson of her blood seeping through the torn knee of her jeans when they trip her, call her _dork_ and _bitch_ and _whore like your mother_.

She does this for a very long time. Outside the window across from her bed, she watches the sun rise and then dip into another twilight. The moon shimmers ghosts through the shadows of her surroundings. Jamie listens to the conversations rumbling in the pub below; the music; the laughter and there she lies so, so long after that first collapse. She survived that somehow, but she doesn’t know what that means anymore.

Somewhere else, Dani is eating supper, going to bed, lying there alone and isn’t that worse than what could have been? Isn’t that so much more tragic than the presence of someone who loves and longs for her, unexpected but careful, lying in bed beside her?

On the second night, after Jamie has risen—has molded herself into the kind of person who might be able to stand on her own again and never look back—Dani calls her. Her voice sounds so regular and Jamie’s sounds the same. Hard to believe how much each word aches and trembles just so.

The worst part is this: Dani won’t admit to anything.

She says, “We just...miss you here, that’s all.”

And when Jamie says, “Who’s we?” the answer omits any culpability from the speaker.

She wants to be angry and her head jangles with the memory of blue markings on Dani’s back to match the color on her own and _I just want things to be simple,_ which Jamie understands, she does, because the memory of that kiss has reared the pair of them into bent-backed _almost_ ’s. 

Her only experience in belonging to someone feels like being given nothing outside of—but _everything_ inside of—that minute moment of _yes yes finally_. 

“Yeah,” Dani says when Jamie tries to go, “I...I’m sure you have...someone waiting or—”

And Jamie thinks 

( _you have a soulmate and I should just_ —)

of the way Dani’s fingers felt clutching her shoulders through her coat and how it feels like being split in two to be apart like this. There’s a noise on the other end of the line, a sharp inhale that wavers just a bit, and Jamie thinks Dani might be crying, but she hangs up before she can decide.

______________

Eventually, Jamie is given no choice but to pull herself from the deepening shallows and return to her life; the manor is waiting for her and the familiar sight of it freezes her breath to her lips. It’s still early, the sun dragging across the horizon behind scuffs of clouds, and Jamie drags herself across the silken grass while her stubborn heart boasts in her chest.

Very soon, she will step inside the greenhouse and be greeted by the sight of Dani, tear-stricken and waiting for her, looking just as lost as Jamie feels—penitent smile on her pretty lips and shoulders set back. Ready for something. Ready for everything Jamie never wanted.

Finally, finally.

A miracle she hasn’t experienced yet: the throb of Dani’s vast and endless love that’s been there the whole time, hidden behind each of their shared terror at the thought of _staying_.

She will say _you’re it for me_ , kiss her hard, tasting of relief and soil-soft morning air. Jamie will say _you’re it for me too_ and they’ll fall into each other’s arms. She will kiss the tender thump of Dani’s pulse at her neck and whisper promises she never imagined uttering against Dani’s lips. Her hands will shakily unfasten Dani’s jeans right there in the greenhouse, blue fingers slipping down into the exquisite heat between Dani’s thighs, and she’ll _know_.

For all the difficulty in her life, this is the easy part. This is the part where she lives happily ever after as lets herself _belong_ with all the handsome marvel of a disciple in the stained-glass spectrum of sun piercing through the windows of the church.

Jamie doesn’t know that yet. She is walking slowly with her hands in the pockets of her coveralls, head tipped down to watch the damp spread of grass beneath her boots. 

She doesn’t know. But she will.

______________

After, she will say the barest truth she has ever known.

“If it has to be anyone, I’m so glad it’s you, Dani.”

______________

“Well, aren’t _you_ in a good mood today?” says Owen, and, at the kitchen table, Dani smiles and presses her lips together. “Or is your face just stuck like that?”

Jamie glances over at Dani who is very pointedly _not_ looking at her as she listens to Flora ramble on and on about something. Ninety-some hours since that first touch 

( _zip brush_ **_blue_ ** _and all that_ )

and eighty-some since that first kiss

( _another life another time another_ —)

and five since

( _it’s you it’s you it’s always been you_ )

she pressed Dani back into the biting edge of the greenhouse table. Since those fingers clutched her shoulders, nails digging in, drawing her nearer and nearer and having sex with your soulmate is something like being inside a star as it explodes because it’s bright-blind and hot because it burns and burns and burns and isn’t that just—

“Earth to Jamie. Come in, Jamie,” Owen drawls and Jamie looks back over at him, dry-mouthed and glass-eyed. She’s meant to be stirring the salad for lunch, but she’s stuck frozen where she is and she can see Dani watching her from the corner of her eye. 

“Sorry,” she mutters and Owen smirks, slinging his handcloth over his shoulder.

“I do believe you have a secret,” he says and Jamie blinks. 

“What makes you think that?” she asks.

“Just an inkling. A twinkle in your eye that’s given you away.”

(Dani with her lips parted and _Jesus, Jamie_ ; Dani’s head tilted back and the heat of her skin beneath Jamie’s mouth; the brimstone-fire between her legs; the _sound_ Jamie’s fingers made as they moved in and out; Dani panting in her neck, into her ear, into her hair; _Jamie,_ **_yes_ **)

Jamie dons her most convincing look of disinterest. “Shove off,” she says, “and hurry up. I’m starved.”

______________

Knowing that Dani loves her—that they’re in this _together_ —does not magically glue every shattered piece of Jamie’s past back together again. It helps, certainly, to know that she is wanted, that she _belongs_ . But in the hours after lunch when she is alone, that age-old fear creeps up with whispers of _what if what if what if_ , plucking at her muscles and bones until she has no choice but to listen.

She tries to focus on other things; it’s been windy for the last week and some of the trees at the edge of the property have shed large branches of themselves across the garden. Most of her afternoon is spent gathering them together by the greenhouse to wait until she decides what to do with them. 

It’s a cold, bitter day and, though the memories of Dani’s soft skin and cool lips are practically exothermic, Jamie still shivers beneath the heavy press of her coat. The weather is likely too much for the children, who are probably bundled up warm and cozy in the schoolroom with Dani. This is to be expected, surely, but Jamie can’t help but take it as a disappointment. 

What is it about soul-bonds and the depthless need to be with your soulmate at all times? Jamie likes to think of herself as a very practical person, but it’s difficult now that she knows how Dani feels beneath her hands. She takes a smoke break around the time the sun begins to drip lower in the sky and spends the entire time staring down at her fingers, turning them back and forth and watching the way they look beneath the light. They are beryl-blue and lovely. Jamie longs to see that same color on the delicate skin of Dani’s back again.

Jamie drops her cigarette on the gravel beneath her feet and stomps it out with her boot. Thinks she’s earned the right to call the day a little early. Just this once.

The need to see Dani again is overwhelming anyway. She’s certain she can’t work through it anymore.

______________

Dani is coming down the stairs as Jamie enters and her smile is blinding the moment they lay eyes on one another. She rushes the rest of the way down the steps and Jamie shrugs off her coat, hanging it on the coat rack by the door, in anticipation.

“There you are,” Dani says, coming to a halt just a few feet away. She hasn’t become any less beautiful in the time they’ve been apart, but, then, Jamie is certain such a feat is impossible. 

“Here I am,” Jamie says dully.

“Done for the day?” 

Jamie nods. “So I am.”

Dani bites her lip and still fails at keeping the grin from her lips. “Okay.”

Despite the simplicity of each statement, the conversation is far from casual. The air pulses around them, electric, and Dani’s cheeks are dusted pink, the collar of her sweater just barely hiding the mark on her neck from Jamie’s teeth just that morning. If it were possible, Jamie thinks she would melt right through the floor. 

She tests her luck: “Miss me?”

At once, that smile breaks all the way free and Dani is taking another dangerous step forward, her hand reaching out to cup Jamie’s cold and blue-stained one inside it. “Am I that obvious?” she asks, the lilt in her voice anything but innocent.

“Maybe only to me,” Jamie says. She squeezes Dani’s hand and longs to kiss her again, but she doesn’t. They haven’t discussed how open they’re going to be about everything and, though she knows how plainly Dani wears her emotions on her face, she thinks she’d like for it to stay _just theirs_ for a little while longer.

“So,” Dani begins, coy as ever, “I was wondering if tonight we could—”

“Soup’s on!” Owen bellows quite suddenly, just in the doorway of the foyer, and they drop hands at once as if by mutual decision.

The announcement is followed by the thunderous, stampeding sound of two children racing each other down the hall upstairs. Miles pulls ahead on the stairs because Flora is still a little nervous of them, taking them one at a time, and then he rushes off after Owen to the kitchen. 

“Miss Clayton! Jamie!” Flora calls once she reaches the ground floor. “Come on!”

With that, she hurries off after her brother.

“What were you going to say?” Jamie asks once she’s gone, reaching out once more to curl her fingers around Dani’s hip and pull her near. 

“Oh.” Dani turns back to her, eyes bright with blue wonder. Her lips curl. “I was going to ask if we could do things properly tonight.”

The calcification of her train of thought catches Jamie so utterly off guard that her breath stutters in her lungs. Her teeth clack together. “Yeah,” she breathes, too quick, too eager. “Yeah, we can. Definitely. We can do that, if you’d like.”

Leaning forward, Dani presses a chaste kiss to Jamie’s flushed cheek. “It’s a date,” she whispers, lips lingering for just the barest breath of time. 

And then she pulls away, oh-so-innocent, and heads to the kitchen, leaving Jamie standing there for a moment as she tries to tie her fluttering heart down.

______________

The next hour spent at the table in the kitchen, under the careful scrutiny of Hannah and Owen—who always seem to know when there’s something going unsaid—is a strange affair. And it’s funny, really, because the last time her and Dani were set right next to each other at this table, they were already soulmates. 

Dani is some strange mixture of exhilarated and nervous that borders on hysteria. She talks to everyone at the table except for Jamie, speaking in staggered bursts of air that leave her winded. It’s as if she’s nervous someone is going to ask her outright; that Hannah will bring up the greenhouse in front of the children.

Her foot keeps bumping against Jamie’s beneath the table. Jamie always presses back.

She is still frightened, yes—dreadfully so—but of something that is relatively new: that pull between them, the weight of what they are to one another that’s tugging so tight she’s worried they both might crack asunder.

“Jamie,” Flora says, pushing herself up a little on the table, “I’m writing a play about you.”

Beside her, Dani freezes even as she’s answering a question Owen’s just asked. Jamie takes a sip of her water, trying very hard to ignore the brush of Dani’s arm against her own. “Yeah?” she asks. “What about me?”

Flora is tinged _pink_ like her nanny and just as adorable. “Well, you’re not you.”

Jamie flicks her eyebrows up. “Oh? Who am I then?”

“You’re a sparrow, but you get caught in a storm and get all tangled up and hurt.”

They’ve gathered Owen and Dani’s attention now and Jamie looks at them each from the corner of her eye as she says, “Oh no!” with a touch of exaggeration to the words.

Flora nods very seriously. “Oh, yes, but it’s okay because— b-because—” and she stops there because she’s too excited to continue, taking in too much air at once and making her words turn muddy.

Miles swoops in to rescue her. “A crow finds you and patches up your wing.”

“A crow, huh?” Jamie asks and Miles nods.

“But she’s a good crow!” says Flora. “Not the bad kind.”

“What’s the bad kind, love?” Hannah asks, touching Flora’s shoulder with her hand.

“The kind that laughs and laughs at you and flies away when you get close.” She says this with a very particular pout. “They’re bad luck.”

Dani reaches across the table to cover Flora’s hand with her own. Rattles it a little as she says, “So what makes this crow different?” 

“She doesn’t fly away,” Miles says and it is very quiet for a long moment, only Jamie doesn’t quite know why. 

The wonders of a child, she thinks. Filled with such solemn myth and magic, so gracious she grieves. 

“I have a question,” Owen says, snapping the silence in two jagged pieces. “How are we going to make Jamie into a sparrow so we can put on your play?”

“Oi, I’m no actor,” Jamie tells him and he laughs. 

“You have to!” Flora cries, bouncing in her seat. “Will you, will you, will you _please_? We can make feathers and a beak and Miles can use his drum to make the storm—”

She babbles on like this for some time, much to their shared amusement, tangling herself deeper and deeper into her own excitement that she forgets what the point was. In all the commotion, Jamie feels warmth on her thigh quite suddenly and glances down to find that Dani’s hand is there, squeezing her lightly.

“Did you eat enough?” she asks with her voice pitched low so the others won’t hear. She tosses a look to Jamie’s plate, where some food remains. She’d been too distracted to eat very much, her stomach brewing with excitement at the thought of being alone with Dani soon.

“Yeah,” she says. She imagines pressing her face into the curve of Dani’s neck and kissing her there, too caught in the spell spun by Dani’s perfume to be coherent. 

Dani squeezes her thigh. “Eat some more for me?” At Jamie’s questioning expression, she leans a little closer and _god_ isn’t it something when she’s brave like this, and: “You might need the energy later.”

Jamie _tsks_ in the back of her throat and blinks. “Yeah,” she says again. “Okay.”

This gets her a bright smile that paralyzes her for just a moment, and then she turns back to her food and begins eating again. 

Dani keeps her hand where it is, tapping love songs on Jamie’s leg for as long until supper is over.

______________

A conversation between a governess and a gardener as they stand side-by-side in the kitchen— Dani washing the dishes and Jamie drying them and setting them in the rack by the sink:

“Once the kids are in bed, did you want to stay here or—”

“I was...I was hoping that maybe we could...visit your flat?”

A question somehow.

“What about—”

“Hannah already agreed to take care of breakfast,” Dani says. “I...asked her already.”

Oh.

“Right then,” Jamie says. “So, my place.” 

Dani glances at her and their fingers touch as she passes her a clean plate. “Is that okay?”

(A note: Jamie has spent nearly every night of her adult life alone. Sarah never stuck around for long after she was through with her and her time in prison had been its own special brand of loneliness because loneliness is subjective. Truly, Jamie is not certain how she’s survived it for so long.)

“Of course,” she blurts out. “Very okay.”

Dani is doing that thing where she bites her bottom lip and blinks too much. “Okay,” she says.

Seen here: how forever feels—the aching connection of two people born to love one another. For a very long time, Jamie thought of this as a curse.

It isn’t. Not at all and she wants to tell Dani this, tell her that she’s surprised her heart has not burst yet. She wants to drop to one knee and she never thought she’d feel like that, but she _does_ and it should be scary, but it isn’t.

Instead, she says, “Okay,” without any fear.

______________

Anyway. The shape of Dani in the door to her flat is something Jamie will never forget. Her hair falls around her shoulders, her eyes darting around the velvet press of shadows in the unlit space. Her sweater is bunched around her hips from the act of having been seated for the entire, bumpy ride over and because Jamie is rapidly learning things about her own self-control, she wants to slip her hand beneath it and press her fingers into the dip of Dani’s spine.

She steps inside, leaving enough room for Jamie to enter, too, closing the door behind them and crossing the room in practiced steps to reach the lamp beside her bed. Clicking it on, she bathes the room in light, finding Dani immediately, still standing just inside the door.

“I know it’s small,” Jamie says, “but—”

“No,” Dani cuts in. “It’s...I love it.” She toes her shoes off at the door, revealing a pair of thick, wool socks and then tiptoes around delicately like she’s worried she’ll leave a lasting impression on Jamie’s life.

How silly to think she hasn’t already.

“Yeah?” says Jamie.

“Yeah,” says Dani. She points to a framed picture on Jamie’s dresser. “Who’s this?”

Jamie crosses the room to stand beside her. “My niece,” she says, smiling as she always does when she looks at it—that poof of brown hair on the top of her head, looking at the world through sleepy, newborn eyes. “Grace. She just turned five in April.” 

She points to another picture, over on her nightstand beside her bed, featuring a picture of the two of them at her fifth birthday party, Jamie pulling her cheeks back into a goofy smile, eyes shut, and Grace mimicking her from her spot in Jamie’s lap.

“Oh my god,” Dani breathes, wandering closer. She picks the frame up and looks at it closer for a long time before she turns and meets Jamie’s eyes again. “I want a dozen copies of this picture. No wonder you’re so good with Flora and Miles.” She looks back down at the picture. “How many siblings do you have?”

A miracle almost as blessed as the shape of Dani’s mouth when she smiles: the ability to have this conversation in the first place.

For years, the subject eluded her.

Now, she says: “Two brothers. Older, Denny’s kid—” She points to the photo Dani is still cradling in her hands, “—and younger, Mikey.”

“I always wondered what it would be like to have siblings,” Dani confesses in a whisper without breaking eye contact. “I want to know everything about you.”

Jamie takes a deep breath. Holds it in her chest until it aches. Lets it out again. “I’ll tell you everything,” she says.

And Dani looks at her, eyes wide, as Jamie marvels at how far three meters can feel when it’s your soulmate on the other side of the distance. “Yeah?” she asks, her smile clean and profound and Jamie is astonished by the reverence that runs through her, gripping her tight in its grasp and refusing to let her go.

“Yeah,” she says.

______________

Sharing a drink in Jamie’s small kitchen, Dani leans her head on Jamie’s shoulder and sighs. Says, “I’m having a hard time believing this is all real.”

Pressing a kiss to the side of Dani’s head, Jamie wraps an arm around her waist and pulls her nearer, passing back the plastic cup of wine. “Me, too.”

Dani lifts her head to take a drink and then fixes Jamie with a serious look. “Where exactly is the mark on my back?” she asks, frowning curiously.

“Um...Between your shoulder blades.”

“Here?” She twists her arm back to touch the top of her back.

“More like—” Jamie, breath thick in her throat, reaches out and touches Dani’s sweater right over where she remembers the mark appearing, “—here?”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Alright?”

“Yep. Why?”

“You just sounded a little disappointed there.”

“Disappointed?”

“Yeah.” 

“Oh, no. I’m not, like— I just had a thought.”

Jamie takes the wine back and swirls the cup in her hands without drinking from it. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” says Dani and the word seems clipped, kept steady by sheer force. She is gripping Jamie’s counter at either side of her so hard, her knuckles are ghost-pale. 

“Sharing is caring,” says Jamie, clenching her jaw so tight that she’s worried it might snap. The memory of Dani, warm and slick beneath her fingers just that morning, hangs thickly in her thoughts. “Come on.” She nudges a foot out and bumps Dani’s socked one with her own.

Dani looks at her for a very long moment. Straight-backed. Considering. Finally, she says the very last thing Jamie is expecting:

“Show me.”

______________

After her mother’s abandonment. After Denny’s spit-fire insults and Mikey’s adoption. After Sarah and prison and _Laurie._ After the Wingraves and Grace; Hannah’s soft hands; Owen’s wide grin. After a single touch crumples every wall she’s ever tried to build down to nothing.

( _Soulbonds_ , those goddamn things, who could belong to another forever?)

Dani kisses her slow and honeyed careful, so gentle that Jamie could weep from it, and she can be gentle, too—of course she can; she _had_ been in the greenhouse—and she will be if that’s what she must be; if that’s what Dani needs. But then it changes. Dani pushes Jamie further into the mattress, threads her fingers into Jamie’s hair to pull her up and closer, her tongue brushing against Jamie’s lower lip, coaxing her mouth open and dipping inside.

Jamie thinks she gasps, but the sound is muffled by Dani’s next kiss and she’s all too happy to let herself drift away beneath the soft rhythm of their bodies moving against one another. Twelve hours. A little more than. It seems like so much longer. She feels like she’s been waiting for Dani forever. Perhaps she has been.

Straddling Jamie on the bed—Jamie’s legs still hanging off the edge—Dani pulls away a little, but doesn’t go very far. Their lips brush together as she says, “You...You want this, ri—” and Jamie leans up to kiss her again to stop the question.

Dots her lips down Dani’s neck and whispers, “Yes, Dani, _yes_. Want you so bad.” She slips her fingertips beneath the hem of Dani’s sweater and palms the waiting skin eagerly. Makes Dani gasp into the kiss and roll her hips down. “Want you properly,” she murmurs, tugging the sweater up a little more. “Like this.” She moves her hands slowly, carefully. Giving time for Dani to say no.

But:

“Jamie. Jamie, Jamie.” A kiss on her cheeks and then her jaw, her neck, as those slim fingers comb through her hair, breath panting out in warm puffs against Jamie’s skin. “I want you, too.”

Agonizingly, Jamie sits up, wrapping her arms around Dani’s middle to bring her, too. She twists her, guiding her into sitting on the bed beside her and then tugs her legs up onto the mattress until she’s kneeling above Dani. “Can I...Can I see you this time?”

Dani nods without hesitation, adjusting until she’s lying down and pulling Jamie on top of herself, then she cups the back of Jamie’s head in her hands and kisses her again. “Yes,” she says, “as long as I get to see you, too.” Her legs hike up so she can press her knees to Jamie’s hips, pressing up a little and then they’re kissing again.

It’s different than it ever has been with anyone else, though there have been less than a handful before Dani. The curl of Dani’s fingers around her hips, the way Dani cups her jaw to guide the kiss, those little noises she makes in the high of her throat. It’s almost too much. Jamie can already feel her shirt sticking to her back from sweat; tastes salt on Dani’s skin when she drags her tongue down her neck. Makes Dani moan and jut her chin up toward the ceiling so Jamie can do it again and Jamie said _properly_ when she meant _slow_ and _romantic_ and _what you deserve_ , but she wants so desperately to crawl down Dani’s body, tug her trousers down and set her mouth to work between her thighs, even if she doesn’t. 

Not until Dani pushes at her shoulders so she can sit up and tug her sweater and undershirt off, tossing them off the edge of the mattress before launching herself into another kiss so quickly that Jamie barely has time to look at her.

“Wait, wait,” Jamie says. Kisses Dani again. “You said I could see you.”

Dani closes her eyes, leaning her forehead up against Jamie’s. “No one’s ever…I’ve never been…” she says, and it catches Jamie off guard—that honesty. Dani’s eyes shimmer a little in the dim light and she looks so young, so terrified, that the air itself stills and Jamie doesn’t need to hear the rest to understand.

“We don’t have to,” says Jamie, because she, too, is nervous, though her muscles ache and burn at the thought of being the first to see Dani like this. “But you’re stunning, doll. Really.”

Dani hums and opens her eyes slowly, nodding against Jamie’s forehead. She cups Jamie’s face in her palms. “I trust you,” she says loyally. 

Jamie kisses her nose, then her lips. “Thank you.”

She has to sit up again in order to reach the clasp of Dani’s bra, but then it’s undone and Dani is topless and in her bed and the realization of this strikes hot in the back of Jamie’s mind. With slow, slow movements, she brushes her fingertips across one of Dani’s nipples, then the other. Kisses her cheek. 

Whispers, “Do you wanna see it?”

It’s a moment before Dani understands, but then: she nods.

______________

Pale-blue finger-strokes on Dani’s pale skin and a happy smile as Jamie angles the handheld mirror so she can see it. Half-twisted on the bed, Dani’s eyes are morning-sky bright when they meet Jamie’s again. Jamie reaches her free hand around Dani’s back and touches the marks with matching ones of her own and Dani shivers at the touch. 

Then: mirror forgotten on the mattress; Dani’s pants tugged down her pale legs; fingers trailing up and down; a halting touch on the wrist and then Jamie’s clothes are being pulled away from her body, too. Fingers trailing up and down silken thighs and then slipping between. Lips caught between teeth. Pupils blown. Crook of a finger. Slip of another. Dani’s gasp and Jamie kissing her silent.

Jamie says, “Dani, _Dani,_ ” and kisses her like she’s afraid she’ll break. Tugs one of her legs up to curl around her hip. Presses down harder. Another kiss. 

There’s a quiver behind her ribs. Devotion. Devotion and wonderment and when she was nineteen-years-old, she found the girl she loved in trouble so she put on her armor and rode into battle for her, except there was no dragon, no sword stuck in the rubble and waiting for her, only iron-cool slabs of cement that served as a funeral shroud like Dani’s gloves. This is how she thought it worked: love makes you do awful, terrible things.

But Dani below her; Dani clutching her tight, squeezing around her fingers. Chanting a string of curses shaped like Jamie’s name as a blessed benediction.

“I’m here, I’ve got you, I’m right here, baby. I won’t let you go, not _ever_ ,” says Jamie. Tears hot in her eyes. Fingers swift and sure. Feral, desperate child of the wind and, yes, she is tempted to be afraid of this, of Dani, but she isn’t because she loves her more than words can ever say, yes, she loves her and that is why—

______________

The arm draped around Jamie’s hips shifts a little, and then a warm palm is pressed to her bare stomach, thumb running along the skin there. Jamie hums and shifts her eyes closed, biting her lip as she feels warm lips on her shoulder, pressing an open-mouthed kiss there.

“I found you,” Dani whispers. “We found each other, Jamie.”

Jamie hums. Presses a kiss to the top of Dani’s sweaty hair. “We did,” she says. “Somehow.” She pulls back until Dani looks up at her, long limbs still snaked around Jamie’s in wired bliss. “And I don’t plan to go anywhere.” 

Dani smiles and leans forward, rubbing their noses together for a moment. “You’d better not,” she says, but it’s clear from the tone that this is a joke. She believes Jamie, she knows she is telling the truth and Jamie kisses her for it. At her waist, she feels the flex of fingers.

“Promise,” Jamie whispers.

“I didn’t know it would feel like this,” comes next, whispered in a sort of hushed awe that Jamie feels echoing in her own heart.

She brushes Dani’s hair from her nape and plants a soft kiss where her jaw meets her throat. “I didn’t either,” she says. 

There’s so much to say, so much to learn about one another, but they have something neither of them has ever been gifted before which is this: the time in which to do these things. 

So, when Dani kisses Jamie, there’s no reason for her to resist. It’s a hard and fierce thing. Like Jamie’s managed to fuck the etiquette right out of her. Dani kisses her and kisses her and she is everything Jamie never knew she was waiting for. This inelegance, this fever-sloppy kissing, makes everything inside Jamie feel still and quiet and she can’t imagine what will find her when it ends.

That first kiss in the greenhouse had been different. Still with the starbent thirst held by two girls trying to find forever in the other’s touch and letting themselves be scared off the moment they touch it. And just that morning, it had been careful at first, but then almost mindless. Dani’s fingernails broke blood vessels in Jamie’s shoulders and the mark she left on Dani’s neck is still an angry red.

Another thing: the hesitancy that existed in those first moments of bare intimacy between them as they fell into Jamie’s bed together was not like this either. They are learning. Adjusting. Figuring out what the other likes without needing to ask. Just understanding in the closed bubble of togetherness how to _be_.

A hand slips between Jamie’s legs.

And, okay. Maybe _that’s_ worth breaking her favorite kiss yet.

“Dani,” she groans, eyes slipping shut for a moment.

When she opens them, Dani is staring at her, entranced and mesmerized, like she’s trying to commit this moment to memory.

“You’re so beautiful, Jay,” says Dani, and Jamie’s really having trouble focusing on what she’s saying; Dani’s deliciously clever fingers are moving quickly, not exploring at all but zeroing in with unlearned ease on where Jamie needs them the most, filling every one of Jamie’s nerves with molten-holt delectation. “I’m so happy it’s _you_.”

“Me, too, Dani, _Christ_ – I-I’m—”

“I know, baby, I know. You’re so—”

And Jamie kisses the desperate, tumbling words from her soulmate’s mouth. She slides her hand down Dani’s arm and rests it on her wrist, feeling the way it moves. “ _Fuck_ , that’s—” she gasps and Dani’s breath hitches. Jamie guides her hand to press harder, to slip lower, and then Dani is slipping down and _in_ , until Jamie is whimpering her name into her mouth.

“You feel so good,” Dani murmurs. “You’re so _good_. I lo—”

It’s only a few seconds after that. Jamie shudders as white, threading _heat_ courses through her veins, numbing her muscles and filling her head with golden clouds. And it’s funny: she’s never felt more like _herself_ than she does in this precise moment.

______________

Jamie remembers: a night all those years ago, the blood-shine of the moon out her window, and a voice saying _we’re going to be together forever_ because yellow arms and yellow elbows and the easy slip into the expected, which she could _never never_ accomplish for herself.

She remembers: _hold your brother’s hand, Jamie_ and _i’ll be just right over here_ and the way those words melted against the ice-chill wind that gusted into the grocery store when her mother slipped out the doors; Mikey wailing and fussing and too big for Jamie to hold, to raise, to save from a pot of water boiling over.

And then: _i just want things to be simple_.

What she wishes she’d said to save them both the heartache: _things aren’t simple, things can never be simple, and i’ve never cared less about simple than when i’m with you so take my hand and i’ll never let you go._

______________

That first night, pressed together in Jamie’s bed, Dani threads the fingers of her right hand through those of Jamie’s left and rests it on Jamie’s stomach beneath the blankets. Syrup in her muscles and nebulas bursting in the darkness behind each blink, Jamie says, “I was looking for you everywhere, you know.”

Dani nudges her nose against the side of Jamie’s jaw. Squeezes her hand. It’s something of an adjustment to be touched like this. So many times in her life, the people that have touched Jamie in any way have meant her harm. But here is Dani: handling her with such startling care. 

“Were you now?” she asks, amused.

A nod. “Yeah,” Jamie says. “Took your sweet time, didn’t ya’?”

And Dani laughs, this light and lovely sound, breath puffing and cooling the lingering sweat on Jamie’s sternum. “Guess I did. Forgive me?”

“We’ll have to see.”

A joke. Dani’s eyes are so kind that Jamie has to fight the urge to blink beneath their weight. She bumps her forehead against Dani’s and stays there for a moment. She is the first person Jamie has ever let even know a bit of what is inside of her, and they’ve barely scratched the surface, but she knows as deeply as she’s ever known anything that Dani won’t ever look away.

“I love you,” says Dani.

Jamie halts. Hesitates. Runs her tongue over her lower lip and lets the shock of being told that for the first time settle over her. “You do?” she asks, unable to keep the hint of panic out of her voice.

Dani smiles like the moon—like wind-summers and river-springs; like winking constellations and the warm pop of firewood beneath a steady flame. She says: “Every single second.”

Then: “Just so you know.”

And Jamie thinks of a little girl, of a little girl beneath the tight scald of boiling water, a little girl who believed with all her heart that

( _she’s never coming back never never never_ )

love was a snare that suffocated the caught, even as they bit at the bloody-slice of the wire.

But little girls grow up. They learn. 

Jamie turns on her side until she’s facing Dani directly and shifts closer, guiding her with gentle hands until they are face-to-face, their foreheads pressed together. Beneath the sheets, she trails blue fingertips up the tight of Dani’s spine until they find their match. Rests them there, stroking softly. 

“I love you,” she says. “Love you forever.”

______________

Cut her open again—slice her straight to spine—and in every bone, every vein, every pulsing piece of her you’ll find these words:

 _I deserve love. I was made for love: this love, this love, Dani, Dani,_ **_Dani_ ** **.**

.. 

**Author's Note:**

> obviously the title is just a thing people say, but i used it specifically with "Finish Line" by Fickle Friends in mind (fave band guys seriously).
> 
> also. Laurie Strode is in this. like...Halloween (2018) Laurie Strode. idk why. but she is. i hope you liked her.
> 
> feel free to come bother me on [tumblr](https://andawaywego.tumblr.com/) bc my mom says i need to socialize more.


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